Calidore—Keats.
La tulipe est pour la fierté,
Pour le malheur la patience.
La Petite Corbeille.
The Herb-Patience does not grow in every man’s garden.
Proverb.
Herb-Patience was also called Patience-Dock or Monk’s Rhubarb. The French call Water-Dock, Patience d’eau and Parelle des Marais, so the name of the quality that is, in nursery rhyme, a “virtue,” and a “grace,” clings to this dock! Parkinson compares it unfavourably with Bastard Rhubarb, though he says the root is often used in “diet beere”; but Gerarde calls it an “excellent, wholesome pot-herbe,” and relates a tale, in which responsibilities are treated with such delightful airiness that it must be repeated here. He begins by saying that he himself is “no graduate, but a country scholler,” but hopes his “good meaning will be well taken, considering I doe my best, not doubting but some of greater learning will perfect that which I have begun, according to my small skill, especially the ice being broken unto him and the wood rough-hewed to his hands.” Nevertheless, he (who dictates on these matters, to a great extent, through his Herbal) thinks that the learned may gain occasionally from his knowledge. “One John Bennet, a chirurgion, of Maidstone in Kent, a man as slenderly learned as myselfe,” undertook to cure a butcher’s boy of an ague. “He promised him a medicine, and for want of one for the present (he himselfe confessed unto me) he tooke out of his garden three or four leaves of this plant” and administered them in ale, with entire success. “Whose blunt attempt may set an edge upon some sharper wit and greater judgment in the faculties of plants.” Any anticipation that his experiment might lead to disaster does not seem to have troubled him! The root of Patience-Dock “boiled in the water of Carduus Benedictus” was also given at a venture for an ague, and this experiment was tried by “a worshipfull gentlewoman, mistresse Anne Wylbraham, upon divers of her poore Neighbours, with good success.” Mistress Anne Wylbraham must have been a woman of temerity!
Garden-patience used to be a good deal cultivated as spinach, but is now very much ignored, partly because few people know how to cook it. The leaves should be used early in the spring while they are still tender, and the flavour will be very much improved if about a fourth part of common sorrel is added to them. This way of dressing patience-dock was very popular in Sweden, and is described as “forming an excellent spinach dish.” Patience is sometimes spoken of as “passions,” but this name properly belongs to Polygonum Bistorta, the leaves of which were the principal ingredient in a herb-pudding, formerly eaten on Good Friday in the North of England. Parkinson also speaks in this chapter of the “true rhubarb of Rhapontick,” which has “leaves of sad or dark-greene colour... of a fine tart or sourish taste, much more pleasant than the garden or wood sorrell.” Dr Thornton, however, says that Parkinson was mistaken, and that the first seeds of true rhubarb were sent “by the great Boerhaave to our famous gardener, Miller, in 1759”—more than a hundred years later. Very soon after Miller had it, rhubarb was cultivated in many parts of England and in certain localities in Scotland.
A FIELD OF ENGLISH RHUBARB